Mod of the Month - November 2008

StackArt

fflow started his worklog by talking about the inspiration behind his latest project, StackArt. A lot of this inspiration comes from art-deco styling, as fflow feels that objects and buildings built with a combination of long lines, bent surfaces and bright colours in mind look visually stunning. This is what he's hoping to do with StackArt - he wants to incorporate elements of the art-deco style into the mod.

The first task was not surprisingly a matter of stripping the case down to its bare essentials and then reversed the motherboard tray. He did this because the case will stand to his left once it's finished and he'd like to be able to look through the window.

Thankfully, it's not a massive task with the Stacker STC-T01 because the motherboard tray is prepped for both ATX and BTX. However, the PSU tray had to be removed in order to make this fairly simple modification fit.

There was another problem that fflow came across though - the case, plus the cables hanging out the back, would be too big to sit on his desk without overhanging. To get around this, he decided to move everything forwards inside the case, essentially removing the cable overhang.

He cut two pieces of aluminium tubing and used them as a spacer - the motherboard tray was then bolted this. It took him a couple of efforts to get the look he wanted, but in the end he settled for tubing running from top to bottom because it looked much tidier.

In his third update, fflow started work on a vent that would sit in between the motherboard and power supply - this would serve two purposes. The first would be to remove the cable clutter that'll be spewing out of the power supply, and second it will provide way of airflow getting to the PSU as well. fflow mocked up a template using an old pizza box with various holes (and movable piecess) to help him decide on the final design for his vent.

Once he'd decided, this was then cut out of sheet aluminium and additional flashes of transparent yellow plexi were cut and then bolted to the aluminium piece he'd cut earlier to enhance the look. On the opposite side of the aluminium vent piece, fflow used a piece of wire mesh to finish it off.

Following this, fflow moved onto his hard drive mounting system that would also act as a makeshift hose tidy for his watercooling loop. He did this because he decided that the best place for the 360mm radiator was in the front of the chassis, which meant there was no longer anywhere for the hard drives to be installed.

He cut various pieces of yellow and green transparent plexi, along with some aluminium tubing to hold everything together once it was finished. Additionally, fflow used an interesting hard drive mounting method designed to reduce vibrations to a minimum - he attached screws to small pieces of rubber that would slide into pre-cut runners in his new hard drive cage.

The finished piece looks mighty impressive and with some nice backlighting, it'll be a great feature of StackArt once it's finished. The project is moving at a reasonable pace, although he's just got back from a few months of travelling which meant he was unable to mod.

Anyway, there's a lot of potential here and some great ideas to boot - you can check out more of fflow's StackArt progress in his worklog and if you think he's got what it takes to become November's Mod of the Month winner, head over here and vote for StackArt!